The SBA Policy and Procedures Book is filled with page after page of safety regulations for constructing these new schools–it is all about building access and keeping intruders out. I suppose it was thought when they got to this section, the school board and SBA would have already chosen a safe site for the building. Not so, in either county.

We have been fighting for over five years to get our new safe school building built at a safe location. The Procedure Book has a brief mention of establishing protocol for shelter in place and lockdown. Also, a brief statement of establishing an evacuation plan and communicating the plan to staff and parents. Shelter in place will be of the utmost importance with surrounding conditions in the industrial park and the businesses at the I-77 interchange. With the one entrance/exit road which may be blocked, we don’t see a real evacuation plan.

These school buildings are going to be like a prison in reverse, designed to keep people out. It sounds like they will need to have a paid employee to handle security in these new school buildings. The schools have to be designed so that any part used by the community will be separated some way from any access to the student areas. Well, in our case that probably won’t matter since our school has less than 400 students and will not have a gym, just a PE area.

Also, none of your arguments stands up to vegetarian eating – which accounts for an ever-growing population. Vegetarianism of course is not responsible for eating/slaughtering any cows or chickens or any animals.

Finally, the post is definitely propaganda. A central message obviously: don’t kill. (Along with other primary points.) And your comment too is propaganda, with a central message: it’s okay to kill.

But as pointed out, your comment is almost entirely mistaken or irrelevant to the central points of the article, and the pictures.

Anyone who reads widely should know that “concentration camp” is used in all sorts of ways. And anyone who doesn’t know would do well to look it up. The post is meant to stimulate thought, discussion, education, action, not to reinforce false generalizations (fallacies of argument) about general terms.

The post is for people with shared values and interests and concerns who may or may not think differently. What would be the point of writing what everyone else is already saying? When writing to do more than simply share information, the point is to say what no one is saying, or not saying enough, the point is in saying what ought to be said.

The more that people expand their understanding of what a concentration camp is and what the implications are for children, students, communities, the better. Entire Japanese-American families lived for years in concentration camps in the US. No one was slaughtering them. But they were certainly “abused and neglected” and probably subject to early death from the conditions.

No one kills refugees detained in US concentration camps on the border, but they certainly are political and social refugees with little or no choice in where they must be, are mistreated to varying degrees, and some die as a result of the conditions, just as some students may die as a result of the Eastwood site, just as WV state Policy 6200 warns.

The concept of concentration camps goes way beyond Nazis and Jews, though some people mistakenly conflate the idea with that one historical situation. It’s a mistake that ignores the number of actual concentration camps in our society, including prisons, and concentration-camp-like situations.

Ever more intensive consolidated schools are a “soft” form of concentration camp, except when they are predictably health-damaging and potentially deadly, as on the Mileground, and then they may also be a hard form. It stands to reason.

Even the super popular movie E.T. referred to a common school as a “prison”; that was more of a joke reference, but surely plenty of people, including children, got the serious side of the reference too.

The sociological history associating concentration camps with Jews and Nazis is interesting. On a related matter, one might try googling “concentration camp” and looking carefully at the number of results and the type of results (and any images) and then google “death camps” and see what you find. I think you’ll find that “concentration camp” doesn’t begin to describe what happened to the Jews at the hands of the Nazis, whereas “death camp” does.

Our schools should be de-concentrated, and even de-camped, so to speak. They don’t need to be de-deathed – necessarily – though that would certainly make for an interesting rhetorical essay. In fact at least one well-known educator and researcher has written on that latter subject to illuminating effect: Jonathan Kozol.